Only a minority of atheistic people harbor atheism, in that case.
I actually tend to think of the unknown bloc in this case insofar as an old social colloquialism might apply. There was an episode of
Golden Girls, once, when Betty White's character pulled the line on Rue Maclanahan, as everyone is reeling because the prim character turns out to be a freaking tiger in bed, and the old cougar is left stammering that nobody knew, and there's the line, about how experience said those who talked about it the most weren't actually doing it.
Similarly, the public faces of atheism we encounter over the years, whether it be high-profile like Dawkins of Maher, or close mundane associations like my sister in law, or, you know, quite frankly, the historically defining face of atheism at Sciforums over the course of years, which means approximately the experience of having encountered however many identifying atheists over the course of nineteen years here, has a strange, similar aspect about it.
I think there is a bloc of atheists in society we generally don't hear from.
The activists we hear from generally make principled stands and don't seem to know their history beyond the names and dates at the heart of their personal complaint; they argue about labels, avoiding considerations of function, often putting more effort into the dodge than it would take to deal with functional questions.
The result is something that looks close enough to what you said, there, that I'm mostly guarding against sounding sarcastic in agreeing. There exists a reasonable possibility that a large bloc, potentially a majority, of identifying evangelical atheists are not actually atheists inasmuch as they still require God in order to fight against It. Consider an argumentative range in which poor execution looks like petulant, childish rebellion, but strong execution comes to read and sound like gaslighting; these advocates really, really
need God, not for any notion of divine salvation, but as an idol to identify against—the salvation they pursue, as such, is internal self-justification of apparent hatred.
What is harder to comprehend the scale and dynamic of is the range 'twixt the
unknown bloc, to the one, and the
God-needing bloc, to the other. Somewhere in there are at least a few identifying advocates who really have their shit together, and any number of people who would, if asked, identify as atheists and also, as it happens, really do harbor atheism.
I can't actually calculate how reasonable or not it is to wonder if maybe they really are a minority among the atheists we normally count. And if they are, we might wonder how severely are they outnumbered.
An abstraction that occurs to me in the moment suggests some sort of question about whether discussion of history is necessarily inherently political; I can't quite suggest it isn't, but the notion has proximity and relationship to an inchoate question about identifying evangelical atheism harboring more of a political argument than anything else.
